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When Intel goes looking for new chip manufacturing technology to invest in, the company doesn’t play for pennies. Chipzilla has announced a major investment and partial purchase of lithography equipment developer ASML. The goal is to bring 450mm wafer technology and extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUVL) within reach despite the challenges facing both deployments.

Intel has agreed to invest €829 million (~$1B USD) in ASML’s R&D programs for EUV and 450mm wafer deployment, to purchase €1.7B worth of ASML shares ($2.1B USD, or roughly 10% of the total shares available) and to invest general R&D funds totaling €3.3B (~$4.1B USD). The total structure of the deal and the various payments break down as follows:

We’re talking about two very different types of investments here, so let’s break them out separately. Moving to 450mm wafers is a transition Intel and TSMC have backed for years, while smaller foundries (including GlobalFoundries, UMC, and Chartered, when it existed as a separate entity) have dug in their heels against the shift. The reasoning here is straightforward. Larger wafers allow for more chips per wafer and improve economies of scale, but they also require new fabrication equipment at virtually every step of the manufacturing process. It’s effectively impossible to retrofit 300mm equipment for 450mm wafers, which makes shifting from one to the other extremely expensive.

A 300mm wafer has an area of 70,685mm2. A 450mm wafer has an area of 159,043mm2.

At present, a number of fabs (including TSMC) continue to operate 200mm wafer lines, but the older 150mm standard has been largely phased out or is operating only in long-commoditized process nodes. Moving to 450mm would probably lead to gradual shutdown of 200mm lines. One of the caveats to 450mm production, however, is that the companies that build out these facilities need to be certain they can ship enough processors to keep the fabs loaded. This is one reason why Intel has staked so much on its “Atom Everywhere” strategy — between die shrinks and 450mm deployments, Intel needs to be significantly active in the cell phone market in order to build enough product to keep its own factories at capacity.

The EUVL situation is rather more complex.

EUVL is a technology that’s been percolating in the background for years, but the deployment time frame has slipped steadily outwards as problems stubbornly refused to roll over and solve themselves. The term refers to the use of extreme ultraviolet light to etch the features of next-generation microprocessors. Up until the 45nm node, everyone relied on “dry” lithography and ultraviolet lasers at the 193nm wavelength. At the 45nm node, AMD and IBM introduced what’s known as “immersion lithography.” This refers to the practice of inserting a layer of liquid between the lens and the wafer. Water, for example, has a refractive index of 1.44.

Immersion lithography allowed process technology to continue scaling at 45nm (for AMD/IBM) and at 32nm (for Intel). Other technologies, like double-patterning, have kept scaling rolling below 32nm — but all of these processes run out of gas when you drop below the 22nm node. At that point, a new scaling technology is required — and that’s where EUVL comes in.

The problem with EUVL is that it requires drastically different manufacturing conditions, a great deal more energy, and takes significantly longer to etch the same number of wafers. According to Wikipedia (take with a grain of salt) “An EUV source driven by a 20 kW CO2 laser with ~10% wall plug efficiency consumes an electrical power of ~200 kW, while a 100 W ArF immersion laser with ~1% wall plug efficiency consumes an electrical power of ~10 kW.” Even if the gap has shrunk considerably since the text was written, the sheer magnitude of the difference in power consumption illustrates the problem.

The ITRS roadmap is actually fairly optimistic about EUV, but notes that commercial production is still years away. Intel believes it can continue extending immersion lithography down past 22nm; GlobalFoundries had initially forecast transitioning at ~16nm, but may or may not keep to that timeline. Regardless, the ASML investment is Intel’s way of signaling that it’s investing the EUV issue by teaming up with a specialized firm while simultaneously ramping existing tech.

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